Jim Fairchild played guitar in two of the bands that shaped indie rock around 2004, and he composed the music you hear throughout this podcast. He joined Grandaddy, the Modesto, California band led by Jason Lytle, in 1995 and stayed until they broke up in 2006. Their albums Under the Western Freeway (1997), The Sophtware Slump (2000), and Sumday (2003) became touchstones of the era. By his account, Grandaddy was worn out from touring Sumday just as the genre was breaking through.

In 2005, Jim started touring with Modest Mouse, fresh off the success of "Float On," and he played with them until 2021. Along the way he released solo records as All Smiles, toured with Giant Sand, and worked as a producer and songwriter. He has also worked as director of A&R at Dangerbird Records, the label that released his first solo album.

For 2004: The Year Indie Rock Broke, Jim created the music that runs under the stories of the bands, labels, and scenes we cover. In this interview, he tells us about the Los Angeles scene, Grandaddy's years on V2, how he ended up in Modest Mouse, and how he approached scoring the podcast.

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Courtney E. Smith: In the podcast, we don't really talk about the LA scene in the 2000s very much at all. When did you start to see things happening for indie rock in LA, and what did that look like?

Jim Fairchild: I started going down to LA a lot, probably in 2000 or 2001. We toured with Elliott Smith sort of late 2000; he and I became buddies, and so I started going down a lot to hang out with Elliott, and then I would hang out with the Earlimart people. And then I just started to meet more and more people down there. There was a lot of energy around Elliott having moved there. It felt like everything was Silver Lake and east of there, right? I think Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett gave me a copy of that first Rilo Kiley record. That was in the summer of 2001. I guess the point is I'm just sitting here giving you a list of bands, but—

Courtney E. Smith: But that's what makes a scene, Jim. That is it.

Jim Fairchild: It felt like there was something really starting to happen around that time. When I would go down there, it felt really, really exciting. I moved down there in early 2004. Elliott passed away in late 2003, and then it seems like a lot of things really started to ignite in 2004, 2005. Dangerbird started as a label, and that turned out to be a really nurturing home for a bunch of people.

Courtney E. Smith: Did it feel like it started to coalesce into a supportive scene where people knew each other and played shows together and hung out together?

Jim Fairchild: Totally. Absolutely. I'm sure I'm conflating a bunch of nights where I was doing absolutely nothing with really super fun, energetic nights, but it seemed like anytime we would go out, there was something going on. There were parties at the Leaky Leaky, parties at the Earlimart house, stuff going on at Silver Lake Lounge.

Courtney E. Smith: Grandaddy ended up on V2 Records, which is an interesting one to me because it's Richard Branson's spin-off of Virgin. I'd love to hear about how you guys ended up on that label and what you think about it in retrospect.

Jim Fairchild: Almost everything in our professional life could be traced back to our meeting Howe Gelb, who still runs Giant Sand. He introduced us to a person named Kate Hyman. Kate signed us for the rest of the world to V2. Kate was like, "Oh, this is going to be the best label. It's going to function like an indie, but it's got Branson's backing because when he sold Virgin, he was supposed to not enter the record business again, and there was some loophole that he found." So he got back in it. We had just done our first tour of the States in 1996. We played in front of no one. Jason and I went up to see some friends in Yosemite, and there was an ATM at the supermarket. We both went to Yosemite with like 20 bucks, and we kept going to the ATM to see if the advance had landed. Which was really funny, looking up at El Capitan and waiting for tens of thousands of dollars to land in your bank account. We rented this 50-acre property in a town called Coulterville, which is an hour east of Modesto up in the foothills, up in Gold Rush country. We asked them for extra money. They didn't know that they were doing this. We built a half-pipe on V2's dime, which also felt kind of good.

Courtney E. Smith: [laughter] Nice.

Jim Fairchild: The wild thing about being on V2 was nothing was happening in America at all. This is late July of 1997, we mastered the record, and then maybe two weeks later, we were hearing stories about, "People are fucking tripping out about this record, can you guys get to Europe tomorrow, basically?" We did this quick trip to the UK and all over Europe. We played a show in London on a Monday night. There were 10 people there. It's people from the label and a few press people. And then the NME writes something, and then the next show is full. Five days later. Then we played a third show the night before we were going to leave, and there was a line down the block. But just weeks before that, we're like, "We need you to wire money so we can do the things that you want us to do, I can't afford the $250 passport rush fee."

Courtney E. Smith: Did it feel like things just kept growing?

Jim Fairchild: It kind of did, and it kind of didn't. We took really, really bad advice in 2003 and 2004 when we were supporting Sumday. I take responsibility for that. We would be like, "Oh, that doesn't work," and then we would get talked into shit. The year that indie rock broke is literally exactly when we were shutting it down, because 15 months of touring Sumday just wore us out so badly. There was a moment where we were on tour supporting Sumday late, late, late in the game, and [Modest Mouse’s] Good News For People Who Love Bad News had just come out. And I was like, "Oh, fuck, we're going to kind of miss the boat." And that wound up being the case. I think that we probably should have just listened to our guts more. It's easier for me to have seen us not having to have taken an eight-year break if we hadn't just listened to really bad advice. Things happen where they're supposed to happen. I've had a really good life in music. I played with Modest Mouse for a long, long time.

Courtney E. Smith: I wanted to ask you about Modest Mouse and how you ended up in that band.

Jim Fairchild: This is God's honest truth. I don't know that I've ever said this publicly. We had gone up to Portland for a couple of weeks, this is late 2004. Joe Plummer, who's playing drums with them at the time as second drummer. I don't really know Joe at all, but he's like, "You live in LA. We're going to be at the Wiltern in a couple weeks, come see us." So I went and watched them play. There was no reason at all for me to think this, Courtney, none whatsoever. I was looking up there, and I was like, Dan Gallucci, he was playing with them at the time. I remember looking at Dan and going, "I'm going to be doing what he's doing soon." There was no fucking reason for me to think that, I swear to God. There was one day, me and Joe drove out to the gorge with Janet Weiss for Sleater-Kinney's opening show with the White Stripes, and on the way back, Joe turns around and he's like, "We're doing this private show with Dan this week. He's quit the band. It's his last show with us. And Isaac loves Grandaddy. Could he reach out to you?" And I was like, "Yeah. You can reach out to me." Isaac calls me one night, this is late summer of 2005. "Hey, man, so we're playing these shows in a couple of weeks, do you want to do them with us? That's it." And I was like, "Yeah. Sounds good." Then there was one night where I was kind of buzzed, and it was just a random Tuesday night, but it was 10 days before the shows. I called Isaac. I was just like, "Just checking in. Do you want to do this still?" He's like, "What are you doing right now?" And it's 11:00 at night, and I'm like, "Just hanging out." He's like, "All right, come over." So I go over there. We all hit it off. And so we just jam, and we jam for a number of days. I would go home every night at 11:00 p.m. from these jams, and I would learn all of the guitar parts for four songs at a time. And then, fast forward a week, and I'm standing in front of a sold-out crowd at Shoreline Amphitheatre in front of 25,000 people, playing these songs that I literally didn't know five days before.

Courtney E. Smith: Oh my god.

Jim Fairchild: At the end of that run, on the very last night, Isaac was like, "Dude, we love playing with you. I just got to be honest with you about something. Before we met you, I had asked Johnny Marr [of The Smiths] if he wanted to come and write some songs with us, so he's going to be here when we get back to Portland." And I was just like, "Oh, cool." What can you say to that? Eventually, Johnny was in the band for a while, and then when Johnny couldn't do a run, I was in the band from 2008 until 2021. So that's how all that went down.

Courtney E. Smith: As a guitar player, if Johnny Marr is going to show up, you're just like, "Yeah, okay, I get it." What made you say yes to coming on board to do this?

Jim Fairchild: I have some representative viewpoints of what that time was like, and I think the younger people that I know in my life, a lot of them are really, really excited about the music that came out of our sort of wave of stuff. I'm stoked to tell these stories, because I feel like it's now a time where people want to hear them. Live music is really, really important. We're maybe the sort of dynamo that sparks a room, but then the energy that's moving around in a room, when people are together, I feel like that is so important right now, Courtney. Looking out at these audiences, kids ranging from pre-teens and then up to people our age, and having this convivial experience, an emotional experience. A friend of mine put it to me this way. He's like, "But here's the thing, dude, what we're all doing, participating in that, is we're planting seeds and people carry that into their lives going forward." When we got booked at Kilby Court, which we did in May of this year, I was like, "Oh, this is going to be interesting. Who knows how this is going to go down, because this is definitely going to be a younger audience." And that was one of the best shows that Grandaddy has done. That might be in top 20 shows we've ever played. Looking out there, the majority of these people were not born, certainly, when The Software Slump came out, definitely not when The Western Freeway came out. And they're just screaming along to it. The kids got it.

Courtney E. Smith: Before I let you go, I do want to ask about your process in coming up with this score.

Jim Fairchild: My experience with scoring so far, when it works the best is when there's an intuitive reaction, a reflexive reaction that you can actually follow, if you're just like, "Oh, that's a cool chord sequence," which feels sort of like this. Let's try this rhythm with it. Cool. All right. Put this other guitar in. If it kind of rolls that way, which this did, all eight of the things that I made for you guys did that, then in most cases, in my experience, that's the sweet spot. If you're really actively thinking about this stuff, it's probably just not going to be as good.

Courtney E. Smith: Robb Nansel from Saddle Creek, he asked me, "Can you remind me what I said?" Because he did the interviews a few years ago. I gave him a brief rundown of where we used his clips, and I was like, "Robb, you're going to be pleased to know that we started calling one of the score tracks Robb Nansel's Theme. Every time we talked about Saddle Creek, it was the Broken Social Scene inspired one." We started just playing that every time Robb talked. He and I talked about the Saddle Creek sound, and he was just like, "I never understood what people meant by that, because there were so many different bands on Saddle Creek that didn't sound anything like each other. So what was the Saddle Creek sound?" And I was like, "We found it. It's this track."